Turning Off Our Screens

With so much of our development and playtime devoted to screens and technology, it’s easy to think that videogames are a screen medium with the same, or at least similar enough, strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for storytelling, or that they’re a technology industry trying to build better, faster, smarter, widgets or tools for creating widgets. Anyone working in games has, at some point, suspected if not outright known that this isn’t the case. This talk looks at other lenses through which to view games, and along the way wonders aloud what it might look like if we broke away from the reliance on screen culture and the surrounding dialogue – and also what we might need to start telling ourselves and others as part of that shift.